Machines Quotes

At home I am a man, at work I am a machine.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.

Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.

With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.

The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.